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THE OLD SOCIAL HISTORY AND THE NEW SOCIAL SCIENCES
| By Herbert S. Klein |
Columbia University & Stanford University |
| While social historians in the United States have begun to look at the new cultural history as a source for inspiration and ideas for new research, they have largely ignored new developments within the other social sciences. It is my aim to survey some of these new ideas and see how they can relate to social history. It is obvious from my essay that I still believe that history, and above all social history, is a fundamental part of the social sciences. Especially with its concern for analyzing the evolution of institutions, classes and groups of people over time, as well as explaining individual human behavior in social contexts, social history is fundamentally a social science. Moreover, as I will try to show, most social scientists are now more concerned with historical issues than ever before, and these diachronic concerns have finally become a major theme in their own research. Thus the social sciences are interested in what historians have to say and in turn offer a wide range of interesting concepts, methods and even research models which can be of utility in our own historical research. I should stress that I do not reject the new approaches which might be offered by the new cultural studies, but only to suggest that the wholesale abandonment of the social sciences, which was much in evidence in the recent issue of the Journal of Social History which reviewed the field,1 is a profound mistake and will lead to ever progressive isolation of our discipline from the important advances being made in the social sciences today. |
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Before examining the various ideas and methods which are currently being discussed in the social sciences today, I should say that I have taken an eclectic approach to some very complex philosophical issues. There is often fundamental disagreement about what is the very object of study. Is it the individual actor, the institutions in which individuals act, or is it the larger entities or systems in which the institutions are embedded? Is causality of change determined primarily by individual decisions, institutions or social interactions, or some mix of all three? There is also much debate about what might constitute the larger systems in which social interactions occur—are they groups, classes, communities, societies, states or some larger entities. There is also a very lively and contentious debate about what even motivates humans to take the decisions and actions they do take and how constrained they may be in their decisions by external institutions, social relations or market conditions. Different schools of thought concentrate on quite different objects of study and often offer opposed models of explanation. That said, I have tried to select those questions and approaches which I personally found most interesting, even if they are sometimes conflictive with each other or not representative of dominant positions. Obviously other historians might find different selections more congenial. |
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If one were to examine the social sciences today, one of the most interesting approaches is a return to consideration of institutions and their impact on social and economic structures of evolving societies. Every social science is now deeply concerned with how institutions influence everything from law and markets to political systems and individual choices, and how they determine the evolution and final makeup of a given society. The origins, development, evolution and current structures of institutions, which remain central to traditional historical interests, are now basic themes in the other social sciences. Along with this new emphasis on change and structure, there has also been an interest in trying to define the underlying motivation and logic for individual and group decisions within society. Especially among Political Scientists this has evolved into the theory of rational choice. These themes appear in several of the social sciences and are often inter-related. While the new institutional and historical emphasis finally brings the social sciences closer to the traditional concerns of all historians, I would also suggest that the ongoing discussion in the social sciences about human motivation is also of basic interest for social historians. |
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